Establishment Historian Sean Wilentz: Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?

The New Republic has a long article from establishment historian Sean Wilentz:

We live in the age of the leaker. Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange are celebrated as heroes on op-ed pages and across glossy magazine spreads.

By exposing the secrets of the government, they claim to have revealed its systematic disregard for individual freedom and privacy. Theirs are not the politics of left against right, or liberals against conservatives, or Democrats against Republicans, but of the individual against the state. To oppose them is to side with power against liberty, surveillance against freedom, tyrannical secrecy against democratic openness.

Professor Wilentz is concerned about libertarianism.